President Donald Trump has purported to fire Lisa Cook from her position as a member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors.

Can he lawfully do that? Or, perhaps the better question to ask: Will the U.S. Supreme Court let him do that?

Before tackling those questions, let's review what the Supreme Court has previously said about the president's power to remove federal agency heads such as Cook.

In Humphrey's Executor v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court unanimously rejected President Franklin Roosevelt's attempted firing of a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. That 1935 precedent was long understood as a flat prohibition against the president being able to fire the heads of "independent" federal agencies at will.

But in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bu

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